Just before his resignation, Nixon’s approval rating was
24%. Jimmy Carter ended his tenure at
32%. Congress is just under 20% right
now. Lynn Swann is insanely
jealous. The hits just keep on
coming.

USC has a new lawsuit to deal with (somebody I’ve never
heard of complaining about retaliation against an alleged whistleblower in the
athletic department), and nobody paid much attention to that. Ho hum, what’s one more lawsuit?

No, the worst public-relations news last week for the USC athletic
department was USC answering this question – Is there any reason to have a
Goodwill Ambassador when all of the goodwill has run out? – with this answer:
No, and promptly dismissing legendary coach John Robinson. USC’s athletic department budget is around
$120 million. They couldn’t find money
to pay a Hall of Fame coach to shake hands with boosters and talk about the old
days. Too bad – those are the only days
worth talking about recently.

Worse yet, Robinson lost his season tickets. USC apparently can’t afford to give free
tickets to a coach that won four Rose Bowls for the program. (“Sorry John; maybe we could work something
out if you had won five….”) I can only
assume that with demand for USC football tickets at an all-time high, there was
little that Swann and the USC decision-makers could do to squeeze Robinson
in. I get it. Looking at the UCLA (attendance 57,116) and
Notre Dame (attendance 59,821) games last year, it’s hard to imagine USC being
able to squeeze even one more person into the stands. The fire marshal would be irate. As Bob Uecker might have said, “Listen to the
roar of the crowd as the [Trojans] take the field.”

So, like USC’s former players who also have to pay after
their lifetime tickets were revoked, John Robinson can only attend USC games if
he pays his way in. He likely
won’t. He’ll be in Baton Rouge with
Coach O, further guaranteeing that the LSU athletic department roster stays
substantially more popular with USC fans than USC’s own department roster.

Since USC is in full Rachel Phelps cost-cutting mode, I have
some ideas of my own. And, no, nothing
obvious like saving money with shorter Title IX hearings by denying the accused
the right to counsel and cross-examination.
I’m sure somebody at USC has already thought of that. I’m talking good, original ideas.

For example, USC could charge fans a cup holder license fee
this coming season. Those cup holders
don’t pay for themselves, and being that this is the most prominent upgrade
that most of the fan base will get, a small fee wouldn’t be outrageous.

USC could return to an old tradition and travel to Notre
Dame by train this year. It appears that
Amtrak can make that trip in just under two days. You leave at 7:16 pm, arrive in Denver the
following evening at 6:20 and arrive in South Bend the evening after that at
8:14.

(But, Chris, you said just under two days. That looks like it’s two days and one
hour. Don’t question me. Without the time change, it would be 1 day
and 23 hours.)

And, if we’re shedding salaries, I hear Lynn Swann takes
home a good check. I propose replacing
Swann with a Magic 8 Ball. When a
decision needs to be made, an athletic department representative walks into the
AD’s office, gives the ball a shake, and gets the answer they need.

“Magic 8
Ball, should the Song Girls be allowed to attend basketball games this year?”

“Outlook
not so good.”

“Magic 8
Ball, should we retain our head football coach despite a 5-7 season?”

For all those asking whether Urban Meyer would take the USC
coaching job, you might be looking at the wrong legendary coach. Bob Stoops apparently still wants to coach,
since he took a job with the (failed) XFL, he’s still in his 50’s, and he was
an early adopter of the style of the new-style USC offense. Is he Urban Meyer? No, but he’s the next level down and still
has a great resume. The guy had a
winning percentage at Oklahoma of .798, and in his 18 season at OU, he finished
in the top 8 eleven times. And he
doesn’t bring the same baggage as Meyer.

This is probably also a pipe dream, of course, but if we’re
going to engage in fruitless and (likely) ridiculous speculation – and that is
precisely what Musings is about – then you might as well throw Stoops into the
mix too.

On the Rick Courtright lawsuit mentioned above, an allegation is just an allegation. This could be nonsense. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t troubled to see allegations of NCAA violations being made by a former insider. He may be wrong. He may be lying. But if somebody wants to continue to have a career in coaching, suing USC in a highly publicized dispute is not the safest resume builder. That doesn’t mean what he’s alleging is true, but it does mean he has some good reasons to not just make stuff up. Second, while I don’t know his lawyer, she has a legitimate resume.

Again, I don’t know what to make of Courtright’s
claims. I have no reason to believe or
disbelieve them. But it’s hard to
dismiss just about any allegations against USC as inherently ridiculous these
days, isn’t it? We’ve seen a lot of
things happen at USC over the last few years that caught me by surprise. So while I’m sure that Lynn Swann was
blindsided by these latest allegations, I’m no longer capable of surprise when
it comes to USC and allegations of illegal or unethical conduct. Let’s just hope there’s no merit to this
newest story.

Now that John Robinson is headed to Louisiana, can I ask the
rest of you a question? How did Robinson’s
1978 team lose to Arizona State? That
USC team may have had the most stacked roster I’ve ever seen. I was only five years old, so I have no
personal knowledge of the game. I looked
it up and saw that Mark Malone, the former Pittsburgh Steelers QB, rushed for
139 yards in that game, so I guess he was a lot more mobile than I
remember. Still, a faster-then-expected
Mark Malone versus Ronnie Lott, Charles White, Marcus Allen, Anthony Munoz,
Keith Van Horne, Brad Budde, Dennis Smith, Chip Banks, Riki Gray, etc.? Seriously, can anybody explain this to me?

Chris Arledge is a graduate of USC’s Gould School of Law and is the co-founder and managing partner of an intellectual property law firm. Chris’s forgettable football career started at Elsinore High School, where his Tigers defeated Kyle Wachholtz’s Norco squad for the league title (Bring on Brad Otton’s team, too!), and ended at William Jewell College, where Chris was a team captain and an all-conference defensive back.